A Stone Boat Read online

  • • •

  When we finished lunch, we went for a stroll in the Bois. We made a little pilgrimage to admire my father’s favorite copper beech (my father has favorite trees in parks across Europe). We talked, as always, about how overtrimmed French parks are, and my mother said how she always wanted to bring children into the Bois and send them running across all those prim lawns. We wondered at the well-behaved twins with a nurse walking ahead of us, stopping to admire the beds but never touching them.

  My mother made plans for us for the rest of the afternoon. I had for some reason never been to Malmaison, so we had our driver take us there, and we sat in the little front garden. Freddy said he had not been to Versailles since his childhood. So we drove to Versailles, partly because of that, but also because my mother wanted to go and visit the Trianon, which she had always loved. Freddy and Helen and I walked across the lawn to look at the building from a distance, and when we reached an optimal vantage point, I turned around to see my parents standing in a measureless expanse of green beside a quick swirl of pink palace at the edge of the limitless woods of Versailles. My mother had put on a pair of large blue sunglasses and I was horribly struck by the picture of her, looking tiny and fragile, next to my father—in the perfect sunshine, with all the laughing thousands who had come to Versailles on a radiant Sunday. The pink of the Trianon is my mother’s favorite color; standing in front of that building, itself so pale and delicate, she looked like a shadow puppet made of paper. She waved; then she turned around and looked up at the folly. I thought of her careful memory focusing for a last view of something she had always visited on happy days. The shock of our situation had settled once over dinner that first night, and then it had withdrawn again. Now it settled once more. How could my mother have become so small so fast?

  We drove back to the hotel in almost unbroken silence, and when we arrived we stopped at the Vendôme bar, where I had sat two days earlier with Helen and Freddy. Now, as we tried to get a waiter, I noticed how ridiculous the harpist was, and how ugly the brown velveteen on the walls. My mother sat holding her sunglasses. We discussed the logistics of her flight and of the visit Freddy and Helen and I would make to the south of France. My mother tried to tell us all the things she had planned to tell us bit by bit during the week, her private anecdotes of the Côte d’Azur. She described the hotel where she had stayed in Nice when she was twenty, and told a story about Picasso and a needlepoint pillow. Then Helen went up to the room for a minute, and Freddy and my father stopped at the front desk, and I was left alone in the bar with my mother. She said, “In a real way, today may have been the last day of my life as I know it.” I dissembled, but she put a hand on my arm. Then she said, clearly and urgently, in the new voice she would make so entirely her own over the following months, “Whatever happens to me, whatever this illness may do to me, however grumpy or difficult or unpleasant I become, I want you to promise that you and Freddy will always remember me as I have been until today.”

  I had not noticed until then that our fixed emotions can perish as easily as new ones; nor had I noticed how changes can without warning violate what we love in ourselves. That request forced all the emotions one associates with an actual death: I instantly found myself searching for things to hold on to, trying to locate how I would remember her, snatching at the odd episodes that had stuck from early childhood. And I found, to my surprise and horror, that I had almost no memories at all, and that the ones I had were meaningless—memories of houses and hotels and restaurants, a few freeze-frames of her in conversation, a chance image of her waiting for me to come home from school or materializing for a visit at summer camp—but none of my mother fully herself. I felt the most terrible emptiness, of having made too little effort, of having lost what should have been my mind’s pictures.

  I knew, of course, how much of my life (even Bernard, even the piano) had to do with acceptance and rejection of what she represented to me—and I realized that to lose her would be to lose my reasons for most of what I did. When I looked for concrete memories, though, I came up with paper-thin images just of how pleasant our lives had been, of nothing more than the pleasantness; and I knew that our lives were something other than that, something at once more and less than that. “Promise you will always remember me as I have been until today,” she said, as though there were one way she had always been, a simple way, a snapshot thing to remember—and my mind was cluttered with bits of long-vanished clothing and songs we had sung when I was six. Then suddenly I thought that if she died I would also have to die, that I would not know how to stay alive without her. I thought that I could no more readily conjure token memories of her than I could such token images of myself. By the time my father came back from the front desk with the confirmed tickets, it was he, and not my mother, who seemed like a visitor from some distant corner of memory.

  • • •

  Later on Sunday the world settled back into place. In my parents’ suite we ordered an odd hodgepodge of dinner from room service, a mix of breakfast food and lunch food and dinner food. Sleek and efficient, the waiters brought it all in on a rolling table, pulled out the table’s leaves, arranged the cerise-and-white floral china, and pulled over chairs. Each time one of the glasses touched another, a perfect note would sound, which the waiters would quickly arrest with their long fingers, as though in mystic regard for silence. We sat on the other side of the room while this was going on, pretending not to notice, and talked vaguely about the weather.

  When the waiters had gone out, we all sat down, and for a moment there was the bustling sound of napkins being unfolded and glasses of wine being poured and people asking for the salt and all those slight room-service negotiations about whose glass of water was whose and whether the bread would fit between Freddy and me and whether we really needed to have the teacups on the table at the same time as the salad. My mother commented on how pretty it all looked. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have someone at home who could wheel in a table like this, flowers and all, at fifteen minutes’ notice?” she said. “Someone who would then come back and wheel it out when you got through, and you wouldn’t have to think about any of the food or the dishes again?”

  “Nice flowers,” I said. “Nice plates. Nice silverware.”

  My mother looked for a moment and then held up a fork. “Do you like the silver?” she asked. “I think it’s heavy-looking. Hotel silver. It doesn’t smile at you.”

  “Does our silver at home smile at you?” my father asked.

  “Of course, Leonard,” she said. “It smiles at you and says, ‘Pick me up.’ Haven’t you ever noticed?”

  “Does Grandma’s silver say, ‘Pick me up’?” I asked. I had inherited my grandmother’s silver two years earlier.

  “Grandma’s silver says it, but very quietly,” said my mother.

  And somehow from then on we flew, telling each other all the stories that the plates and glasses and forks and knives had confided to us over the years, and my father repeated the anecdote that one of the red glass plates had told him about my great-aunt Elizabeth, and the evening wove itself into fantasy and hilarity, so that in the end we left behind the terror of the day. Freddy took the part of the dish that ran away with the spoon, and I was a champagne flute, and my father was the blue teapot, and my mother was the two silver candlesticks with the curving feet that had stood in the middle of the dining-room table all my life. Helen played along effortlessly. In this state, one short of dreaming, my family passed an evening as bright as any we had ever had together. With Helen half participant and half audience, we felt once more unassailable, and the mortality lingering over our heads seemed as remote as mortality had always seemed.

  Though it embarrasses me to admit it, I was distracted throughout by the cut on my lower lip, which was so immediately and maddeningly and constantly painful that I could not really focus much on anyone else’s complaints. These defenses are conveniently on hand in t
he face of tragedy, and they countermand it, allowing us to stay in the comfortable world of detail, safe as room service. I also felt that I had my news about the recording contract, and that there might not be another appropriate moment for it, and I kept wondering whether I should interject it somewhere. The Schubert and the Rachmaninoff. But I didn’t say a word.

  • • •

  Monday morning, like all mornings, is a blur. My parents caught their plane. I hugged my mother. We all agreed that she would certainly be all right. And then came the dream trip for Freddy and Helen and me, another two days of Paris and then the south of France. You must understand how my mother planned our family trips. Everything was always laid out in painstaking detail, every restaurant reservation made, every route worked out. “What shall we do today?” Freddy would say over breakfast in Saint-Paul. “I want to swim.”

  I was guardian of the order. “It’ll have to be the pool,” I would say. “The ocean’s not on today. Today we’re seeing the Matisses, and then in the afternoon we’re going to see Cocteau’s house, with the big murals and the garden. I want to take a look at the church there where they do concerts; I might come back and play here next summer. The car’s due at ten, and lunch is being packed; there’s supposed to be a lovely place where we can stop for a picnic just past the valley. And at some point I’ve got to practice for a couple of hours. Maybe at the end of the afternoon? You two could swim then.”

  Freddy would glower, and Helen would make peace. Each day fell into a sort of inner coherence on the basis of the arrangements. Wednesday was clearly the day to go down to the sea: a boat had been arranged to take us to a particularly charming and inaccessible cove, and we could have lunch at a café in a nearby village. In the afternoon, there was time to swim at the beach. Dinner was to be at the hotel since the schedule was rather an exhausting one. Thursday we needed to go to a particular museum because we had a lunch reservation near it, and the lunch reservation was for one because the museum was open in the mornings from ten to twelve-thirty. In the evenings, to prove our independence, we sometimes did other things: once we drove to a local theater and saw an American police film, with a lot of exploding vehicles, dubbed into French.

  My practicing time, like everything else, seemed to have been scheduled, and there was not enough of it. I could not get up and play at night, as was my wont, because I would have woken the other hotel guests. If the French doors to our room were open, I felt that people were stopping to listen to me, and this was somewhat frustrating; I tended to get exhibitionistic, and did not work on the new pieces I needed to master. If the doors were closed, the room became suffocating. Helen had nowhere to go but Freddy’s room while I was playing, and she sometimes got peevish. “That Schubert’s lovely,” she said to me. “But if I have to listen to the first movement again this week, I’m going to go stark raving mad.” I had still not told her about the recording contract, and could not explain why the Schubert was so urgent.

  There was no way that we could transform the holiday into the sort that Freddy, Helen and I might have worked out for ourselves, because it was not that sort of holiday in any of its most fundamental components, and it was not subject to our regulation. We were staying in a château outside Saint-Paul de Vence, one of those places striking for its irreproachable lack of ostentation. We had rooms painted very white, almost monastic in their simplicity, except that they were always full of flowers, and our rooms shared a private lawn, which commanded a view across the valley and the town of Saint-Paul and on toward the sea. It was on this lawn that we had breakfast every morning, surrounded by the discreet sumptuousness that my mother loved so much.

  We called home each day, and with each new test that was performed it seemed more and more likely that my mother was going to be fine. The suspense all led up to Thursday, when they would do the surgery. We spent Thursday at the scheduled museum, and then ate the scheduled lunch. It was one of those days when the weather was unduly heavy, like a tarpaulin over one’s senses, and I remember feeling exhausted and numb and anxious. Then, too, I was overwhelmed by that belief, which so often sets in at a moment of crisis, in one’s own ability to influence fate by dint of the pettiest of actions. So I ritualized every footstep, every bite of food, every breath, every remark, every passing image of desire. We ate lunch on the terrace of the restaurant, with the playing fountains, and wondered whether the rain would come. Then we drove back to the hotel, where a problem on the telephone lines made it very difficult to get through to America. Perhaps half an hour went by while we got recordings in French and recordings in English, and then finally we reached my father.

  Only after he said that it was cancer did I realize how fundamentally I had persuaded myself that it would not be. My mother had a cancerous cyst in her abdomen, and the disease had spread into certain internal membranes. The tumor had been removed, along with various expendable bits of anatomy, but it was not possible to remove enough of my mother, and so chemotherapy was prescribed as the only way to deal with the spread of the disease, a spreading not of what is fittingly called gross tumor, but of tiny pinpoints of malignancy. We did not know how high the chances were that the cancer would be entirely eliminated. We were all stuck on the word “cancer,” as though its consonants and vowels were the razor spikes of a barbed-wire fence that ran between us and how we had been. It was a word too full of obvious drama, like a bad TV movie, like a modern version of grand opera—and my mother, musical though she was in general, hated grand opera. “All those maudlin women shrieking endlessly before they die,” she used to say. “So implausible and so tedious.” The chemotherapy was scheduled to occupy nine months, and we were told that it would make my mother very sick for a week or so each month when it was administered. We also learned that it would make her lose her hair.

  There is a fine line between tension and emotion; an excess of one can eliminate the capacity for the other. I had been so anxious for so long about the result of that test that I could feel only a sense of sorrow, not so much sorrow about the specific fact of cancer as sorrow that the irresolution was going to continue. It was like tumbling into something open and endless. For at least an hour Freddy and Helen and I all sat still in our hotel room, stiff on our chairs, staring at the ceiling and having nothing very much to say to one another, because there is nothing much to say about disease. After that, we booked our tickets to go home as quickly as possible—there were no flights until the morning—and packed our bags. Then we found ourselves once more in our rooms, and I did not want to play the piano, and it struck me as altogether intolerable to sit for another minute staring at those walls.

  I had always wanted to go to Monte Carlo. It comes up in conversation a lot, and you always feel that you should have been there, if only so that you, too, can dismiss it rather casually. Also, I have a sort of mental checklist of European countries. I have yet to visit Belgium, Luxembourg, Finland or Norway. Or Andorra. I don’t know why these should be the gaps, except Andorra, which I think most people visit only if they keep mental checklists of this kind. To come so close to ticking off Monaco and miss it would have been a shame. It was a destination that offered itself, and the night was too long in front of us, and so we went. We had promised my mother, who feared the roads, that we would not drive to Monaco after dark—how odd it was to betray her at that moment.

  It was the strangest of night journeys, driving out on the lowest Corniche and back on the middle Corniche. There is a geography that holds us forever in our places, that makes us feel clearly the size and scale of human life itself, and the views of that drive—the land and the sea and the sky in geometric monochrome balance—seemed to sharpen all our senses and to remind us of ourselves. On the way to Monte Carlo, Freddy drove and I navigated and Helen was in the backseat; on the return trip, Helen drove and I navigated and Freddy dozed uneasily. It was a clear night, and mostly we could see only the sea stretching away from us. By night, Monte Carlo looks like an opera
set, up against the water, spotlessly clean, busy with all-too-worldly figures rushing through lives of what the imaginative tourist suspects to be sordid extravagance. In fact, it seems also as pleasantly middle-class as a suburb. We parked the car and went to the casino, where everything had been gilded and carved and brocaded to the point of shapelessness. We walked through, the three of us, passing judgment: on the overly spectacular interior, on the overdressed gamblers, on the overtired croupiers. Afterward, we went to an overcrowded café with an apricot-colored postmodernist canopy covering the tables, and watched a light rain falling through the fairy-tale lights of the casino and the fountain in front of it.

  We all felt guilty for being out in a city of lights and fashions, but though we talked without a break about my mother, and though I found myself lapsing horribly into the past tense as I spoke about her, we also felt reassured somehow by the palpable evidence around us that the world goes on. We adduced that we, too, would go on; we proved to ourselves that this was not the end. It was not the eternal ocean that told us that; it was the bright lights, the absurd clothes, and the chocolate ice cream in the café. The next day, Friday, Freddy and I caught the morning plane, and headed for home.

  • • •

  Is the picture I have started here entirely accurate? Perhaps I was angrier that week than I remember, but I think, in fact, that when I first saw that my mother might be sick, my anger got put away somewhere, and my mother became as glorious to me as she had been in my childhood. Though I had gone to France to sever ties, I knew that I could not squander what might be a limited time on undermining a perishable intimacy. In fact, my mother was not always exactly as she would have wanted—even her control did not run so far—but she was always striving to be as she would have wanted, and it is really too late to take her to task for her occasional lapses from grace. In the first weeks of her illness, my mother was to reveal more clearly her terrible brutality. She could be harsh, and she was demanding, and she could be selfish. I will tell you about these things, because my mother’s love, like any love, came at a price—but that is not to say that it was a compromised love.